Woolfian Afterlives

This chapter explores Virginia Woolf’s catalysing role for artists working in non-verbal media, including the visual arts, music, dance, and design. An analysis of Woolf’s impact beyond the medium of her writing allows for a trans-historic and international study of her legacy, charting her influence from, for example, landscape painting in Cornwall to Japanese Butoh; and from North American opera to the Ballet Russes. The chapter will trace many of the vital and fluid connections between Woolf, her contemporaries, and those whose work she has inspired. In the visual arts, case studies include: Sara Barker, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Judy Chicago, Aleana Egan, Rebecca Horn, Laura Owens, and Patti Smith. The music of Edith Sitwell, Ethel Smyth, Dominick Argento, Indigo Girls, The Smiths, and Patrick Wolf is discussed alongside dance by Lydia Lopokova, Wayne McGregor, and Setsuko Yamada.

What Not To Wear At The Opera: Outfitting Sociability At The Met

This research project proposes that fashion performs a critical role in the perpetuation of class hierarchies in American opera audiences. Dress is used by opera patrons as a mode of expressing their economic, social, and cultural capital, thereby affirming their status within society. The Metropolitan Opera house, opened in New York City in 1883, was built intentionally to create a space for the New York elite class to socialize, incorporating architectural features that reflected the power dynamics of New York society, effectively prioritizing sociability over musical integrity. This study is supported by analysis of early Vogue magazine articles that directly contributed to the formation of the opera as a pursuit for the upper-class; as well as a critical investigation of photographs drawn from the Met archive revealing the ways in which fashion at the Met performs economic and social power.. Ultimately, this project uses dress to examine the embedded class hierarchies that sustain an elite, exclusive audience for opera in America; indeed, the study shows that the combination of opera and fashion created class cohesion through mutually acknowledged cultural literacy in New York City.

What Not To Wear At The Opera: Outfitting Sociability At The Met

This research project proposes that fashion performs a critical role in the perpetuation of class hierarchies in American opera audiences. Dress is used by opera patrons as a mode of expressing their economic, social, and cultural capital, thereby affirming their status within society. The Metropolitan Opera house, opened in New York City in 1883, was built intentionally to create a space for the New York elite class to socialize, incorporating architectural features that reflected the power dynamics of New York society, effectively prioritizing sociability over musical integrity. This study is supported by analysis of early Vogue magazine articles that directly contributed to the formation of the opera as a pursuit for the upper-class; as well as a critical investigation of photographs drawn from the Met archive revealing the ways in which fashion at the Met performs economic and social power.. Ultimately, this project uses dress to examine the embedded class hierarchies that sustain an elite, exclusive audience for opera in America; indeed, the study shows that the combination of opera and fashion created class cohesion through mutually acknowledged cultural literacy in New York City.

Negotiating Convention: Pop-Ups and Populism at the San Francisco Opera

Twenty-first-century North American opera houses have attempted to bring in new audiences to make up for a declining and aging population of subscribers through means both traditional and unorthodox. The San Francisco Opera's SF Lab Initiative (2015–2018) was created with such goals in mind. Alternative forms of programming, which I categorize as auxiliary programming, have gained traction as a marketing and aesthetic strategy in recent years, and ultimately signal a dramatic shift in approaches to regional opera production in the United States. While scholars have explored the creation and funding of contemporary operatic productions in the United States, little attention has been given to forms of programming beyond the operatic mainstage. Using interviews with company members and analysis of advertising and reception of the events, I examine the SFO Lab programming as a site of negotiation between operatic convention and experimentation. Based on a populist vision of operatic access, the SF Opera Lab re-contextualized rather than eliminated class and intellectual hierarchies. More broadly, this application of experimental performativity contributes to discourses about Pan-American experimentalism(s) and demonstrates the ways in which a focus on local encounters can yield broad applications for genres and/or scenes beyond opera in the United States.

Some Musical (and Other) Readings

The “landmark” status of Oklahoma! prompts examining it through a series of case studies in terms of how musicals work in dramatic terms (not least given their inherent lack of verisimilitude); the problems of reconciling convention with innovation; the way the show plays with pastoral tropes; its connection with notions of Manifest Destiny; the treatment of characters according to gender and ethnicity; the role of Oklahoma! as wartime propaganda; and the question of how close the Broadway musical might come to being a form of “American opera.” These issues reveal the cultural work that the show did in 1943, and still does today.

Vanessa

When it was performed in 1958, Barber’s opera Vanessa was the first new American work produced by the Metropolitan Opera since 1947 and only the twentieth since the opening of the opera house in 1883. It took Barber two decades to find a libretto, and his search finally culminated in his own backyard, as it were, when his partner Gian Carlo Menotti offered to write the libretto. This chapter narrates how Vanessa evolved, from the creation of the plot to the actors and sets. Set in an unnamed “northern country about 1905,” the story unfolds about two women: Vanessa, a lady of great beauty, who for twenty years of winter after snowy winter has awaited the return of her only love, Anatol; and her beautiful young niece, Erika. The concluding quintet is considered one of the most brilliant climaxes in the twentieth-century repertoire. The opera’s critical success led to the production of Vanessa at the Salzburg Festival, the first American opera performed there. There have been numerous productions in the United States and abroad since then, including a brilliant one at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2018.